Article: Israelizing the American Police, Palestinianizing the American People
Available to Read: here
Discussion: Saturday, May 8, 2021, 2:00 p.m. EDT with the author, Jeff Halper
Registration is closed. You can watch a recording on our YouTube channel reached through rw4p.org/YouTube.
The presentation will review the article, Israelizing the American Police, Palestinianizing the American People, by Jeff Halper published by Americans for Middle East Understanding.
Summary
In this article, author Jeff Halper discusses:
- The approach(es) needed by a democracy to deal with the threat of terrorism to a country’s homeland security.
- How law enforcement professionals in the U.S. and other nations jointly attend training seminars in the US and Israel, focusing on counter-terrorism training.
- That police and military forces are not independent from each other in Israel, unlike most Western countries. That this has implications for U.S. police whose personnel receive training alongside their Israeli counterparts.
- That Israeli experience and expertise, developed while dealing with Palestinians, are now being exported as training, weapons, and equipment for riot control and surveillance.
Halper warns of the dangers of an increasingly militarized police in a Security State, and he asks us to consider the consequences.
Jeff Halper
Jeff Halper is an American-born anthropologist who has lived in Israel since 1973. He is the Director of The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and a co-founder of the Palestinian-led One Democratic State Campaign. Jeff’s presentation follows from his work for his 2015 book, War Against the People.
Jeff’s new book is The Decolonization of Palestine – Towards a One – State Solution, available now at bookstores. His earlier books include: An Israeli in Palestine, Between Redemption and Revival. Jeff was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 2006.
Ted Brown
Ted Brown, of the Rochester Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, will present a summary of the 2018 joint report of JVP and RAIA (Researching the American-Israeli Alliance), ‘Deadly Exchange: the Dangerous Consequences of American Law Enforcement Training in Israel’.
Ted Brown is a professor, emeritus of public health and policy, medical humanities and history at the University of Rochester. Ted publishes on the history of international and global health. In 2019, Ted co-authored, with Marcus Cuento and Elizabeth Fee, The World Health Organization: A History, Cambridge University Press. Ted’s area of research is the history of health policy in America and he specializes in the intellectual, institutional, and the political histories of medicine.
Photo provided by Jeff Halper under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.